Sanguis Deserti
by SerenLyall
Summary: The children of the desert are cursed; the children of the desert are blessed. The desert gives and takes, just as it pleases.


**Disclaimer:** Star Wars, Luke Skywalker, Leia Organa, Beru Lars, and all thus-related names, places, objects, etc. do not belong to me. They belong to Disney and to Lucasfilm in their entirety.

 **Rating/Warnings:** K+; Violence

 **Time Frame:** _Return of the Jedi_

 **Notes:** Originally posted on tumblr ( weary-hearted-queen).

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 _sanguis: Latin; noun; third declension, masculine; nominitive: subject  
-meaning: __**blood**_

 _deserti (from desertum): Latin; noun; second declension, neuter; genitive: possession  
-meaning: __**of the desert**_

 **Sanguis Deserti**

Leia Organa is covered in blood by the time she reaches the deck of Jabba's sail barge. The broken end of the chain that had sought to bind her to her captor gleams in Tatooine's harsh sunlight, wisps of hair pulled free of her intricate braid cling to the sweat on her neck and forehead, and a feral grin curls her lips and ignites her eyes to desert flames.

An ax is in her hand, ripped from the dying grasp of a man who had tried to grab her as she fled the belly of the barge. He had grabbed her, and his blood had been the first to stain her chin, her shoulders, her hands. The blade's tip drips crimson, black, yellow-blue, drips with the dying gasps of a dozen lives, stolen by its razor edge and by the hands that grip its haft in a hold far too comfortable for a princess.

 _The wind tugs at her hair, coils around her ankles, brushes against her cheeks and forehead and bare shoulders. Welcome, welcome_ _the desert sighs. Welcome home, dear child of the desert..._

Luke sees her appear from the bowels of hell, streaked with blood and trailing death, and he cannot help the small smile that tugs at his own lips. He had known, when first their eyes met back at the Palace, what was to come—though whether that was Jedi precognition or simply an understanding of this woman, whom he loved with the very marrow of his bones, Luke could not say. He had seen it in her burning gaze. He had seen it in her fists, curled against the dais beneath her. He had seen it in the collar fastened about her neck.

"Behind you!" Leia cries, voice ringing out loud and clear and sharp like glass against the desert sky—and Luke whirls, almost before the words have even left her lips, her warning crackling upon the waves of heat rising from the planet's molten core even before the air rushes past her lips.

A crack; a red blaster bolt splashes, spatters against a blade of flickering green flame. A man's pained scream as skin boils and bursts along his temple.

"Thanks," Luke calls, and he knows that she hears him, acknowledges him.

 _Above them, the desert sky laughs. Do you not see? the blue eye of the world cries with mirth. Do you not feel your feet dance as one, your hearts beat in time? Oh, my children..._

Leia does not laugh as she cuts down the last man standing between her and the cannon, though she does smile, grim and cold. He had grinned at her—leeredat her, broken teeth showing yellowed spit and swollen gluttony—and had not seen the blood dripping from her hands, had not heeded the screams of the souls that she had bound in death, trailing after her in pained damnation.

He takes a step toward her, and she takes his heart.

"The desert takes," Luke's aunt had told him once.

And oh, how he knows that. It had taken his grandmother, whose grave stood just on the other side of the garage. It had taken his father, who was driven mad by the wanderlust the desert had birthed him. It had taken the mother he had never known, and the aunt and uncle who had called him their own. Oh yes, the desert took.

"But it also gives," his aunt had always added.

Luke had never before understood what she meant by that.

But now, as Luke turns, arm outstretched to welcome Leia to his side, he catches sight of something he never imagined to see.

He sees a pale shadow against the blue of the desert sky, brilliant and proud. He sees a wave of cascading darkness against golden sands. He sees crimson-daubed hands, and eyes that burn with a rage that could be born only of the desert.

He sees strength, and wrath, and a fire—strength, and wrath, and a fire which he has glimpsed before, in his memories and dreams and even, sometimes, in his own reflection—in the woman who would be his sister.

"You are a child of the desert," his aunt had told him more than once, smoothing back his tangled hair and kissing his forehead as she tucked him into bed. "The desert will take, but it will also give."

 _You are children of the sky, the Desert whispers, kissing their foreheads and blessing their lips with sand and wind and sun. You were only ever mine to temper and teach._

"You are a child of the desert," Luke will tell Leia that night, as they stand beneath Tatooine's moons and watch the sand sift and change beneath the night's bitter touch. "The desert—it gives to you, and it takes."

"I don't understand," Leia will reply, frowning, eyes dark against the star-strewn sky.

And Luke will smile then, a flash of light in the night. "Neither do I," he will admit, before folding the woman who is to be his sister into his arms.

"We are children of the desert," Luke will tell Leia on a bridge far above the ground on a far-distant moon. "It has taken, but it has also given."

"I still don't understand," Leia will whisper, and her words are only half a lie.

"Me either," Luke will say, the lie made whole, and he will take his sister's hands. "But we'll figure it out. Together."


End file.
